——“Everything is ready now,” said his wife. “Though I do hate to disturb Edith and Alan. I’ll just run up and hear the children say their prayers before I put those things on the table. If you would just take a look at the furnace—” it was the sentence Mr. Belmore had been dreading—“and then you can come up and kiss the children good night.”
Mr. Belmore, on his way up from stoking, caught a glimpse projected from the parlor mirror through an aperture in the doorway which the porti—res had left uncovered. The reflection was of a girl, with tear-stained face and closed eyes, her head upon a young man’s shoulder, while his lips were touchingly pressed to her hair. The picture might have been called “After the Storm,” the wreckage was so plainly apparent. As Mr. Belmore turned after ascending the flight of stairs he came full in sight of another picture, spread out to view in the room at the end of the hall. He stood unseen in the shadow regarding it.
His wife sat in a low chair near one of the two white beds; little Dorothy’s crib was in their room, beyond. The three children were perched on the foot of the nearest bed, white-gowned, with rosy faces and neatly brushed hair. While he looked, the youngest child gave a birdlike flutter and jump, and lighted on the floor, falling on her knees, with her bowed head in the mother’s lap, her hands upraised. As she finished the murmured prayer, helped by the tender mother-voice, she rose and stood to one side, in infantine seriousness, while the next one spread her white plumes for the same flight, waiting afterwards in reverent line with the first as the third hovered down.
It was plain to see from the mother’s face that she had striven to put all earthly thoughts aside in the performance of this sacred office of ministering to innocence; her eyes must be holy when her children’s looked up at her on their way to God.
This was the little inner chapel, the Sanctuary of Home, where she was priestess by divine right. It would have been an indifferent man, indeed, who had not fallen upon his knees in spirit, in company with this little household of faith, in mute recognition of the love and peace and order that crowned his days.
He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him, before she turned down the light. When she came out of the room he was waiting for her. He put his arm around her as he said, with the darling tenderness that made her life,
“Come along, old sweetness. We’ve got to go down and stir up those lunatics again. Call that ‘the happiest time of your life!’ We know better than that, don’t we, petty? I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll go to church with you next Sunday, if you say so!”
In the Married Quarters